BMW Motorrad USA will show the S1000RR superbike in the United States for the first time this coming Memorial Day weekend at the Miller Motorsports Park World Superbike round, with the bike hitting US dealership floors by January 2010. Pieter de Waal, Vice President of BMW Motorrad USA, has revealed that BMW intends to position the S1000RR against litre-class superbikes from Japan.

‘We intend to take the four Japanese head-on. We did not intend to build a motorcycle like Ducati does or KTM does. We wanted to build a mainstream motorcycle,’ says de Waal.

Todd Anderson head of marketing at BMW Motorrad adds, “It’s going to be very different than what people might expect from BMW. It won’t be a 1098 or RC8 kind of price, but much, much closer to where the Japanese are. We’re going right for the fat part of the market with this, and I think it’s going to change a lot of people’s opinions about the brand.”

Unlike certain other manufacturers, BMW realizes the importance of capturing younger riders. Thus, BMW is moving its product line to include younger buyers with its bikes. “It is critically important for us to get younger people on BMWs. It’s not the fact that the average BMW rider is old – because old people are affluent, and there’s nothing wrong with that – but it is that they are getting older. So you have to bring new blood in. We’ve addressed it with the sport enduro, the new 650 and 800 twin series, and we feel the Superbike must do that in a big way.”